Revolution Today: Three Reflections

• Published in: Socialist register 1989-01, Vol.25
• Main Author: Wolf, Frieder Otto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Capitalism; Dominance; New Deal; Radicalism; Revolutions; Services
• ISSN: 0081-0606

Today, on the threshold of the 1990s, rethinking the very idea of revolution has turned into an urgent task. There is double urgency about it - an urgency of re-thinking of our conceptions of revolution, some of which have become outdated, and an urgency of the 'thing itself, of revolution as a real process. Our current ideas on 'revolution' have been first fashioned by the great divide of the late 18th century, i.e. by the French Revolution, the 'political revolution' against late feudalism, with its popular uprising against the established powers, as well as by the British 'Industrial Revolution', the economic revolution that brought about the world-wide dominance of capitalism, which caused deep structural transformations of society, comparable only, it seems, to the 'neolithic revolution' that ended nomadic modes of production. The series of defeated proletarian uprisings since the early 19th century that culminated in the victorious Russian October of 1917 has radicalized our thinking on Revolution by bringing those two aspects much more closely together, but has not altered the basic formula which could be resumed as 'Jacobinism plus structural transformation'. The Stalinist deformation of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union - and the ensuing deformations of the Communist movement - has, then, oddly blurred our perspectives: by claiming its monopoly on the very idea of revolution, while turning it into an ideological tool in the service of another system of domination. Less spectacularly, although probably still more profoundly, our thinking on revolution has been influenced by the historical destiny of the competing 'evolutionary' approaches to social transformation - from Austro-marxism via Sweden's 'middle way' to the post-war 'welfare state': their 'failure in success' has been in fact the vital factor to put the idea of revolution on the agenda of history again, in the centres of a world-wide system of capitalist domination, in a new beginning of revolutionary politics in the 1960s. Still less visible, however, but maybe still more effective, has been the impact of the 'passive revolutions', which have shaped the last hundred years far more deeply than the active ones, the -sometimes rather radical- changes by which ruling classes or dominant, imperialist states have prevented real revolutions from effectively sapping their domination, reaching from the political 'reforms' of Louis Bonaparte via Bismarckian social reforms to the 'New Deal', and